My notes from a close reading of Marx's Capital

Capital Volume 1, Chapter 1: The Commodity

Marx begins, quoting himself from A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, published eight years earlier, that ‘the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”’ (here we should read ‘appears’ [erscheint] as ‘takes the form of’, i.e. that the word ‘appears’ here suggests not illusion, but a social fact that needs further investigation and explanation); the commodity as its ‘elementary form’. ‘Therefore’, Marx observes, we begin with the analysis of the commodity.